On Oct 13, 2010, at 5:53 PM, William Conger wrote: > But how one tastes it or remembers it is a creative reconstruction, all > subjective. In other words we have one supposedly inert and unchanged fixed > object, candy bar, and one variable object, taster, that judges the candy.
A consideration: The "variable object, taster" is not one factor, but at least two, and possibly three. A few years ago I had a "misadventure" at the hands of a surgeon. She was doing a relative minor "procedure" called an endarterectomy -- the cleaning out of a carotid artery where plaque was accumulating. Evidently as she clamped the top of the artery, she jiggled into the blood stream some of the very plaque that the procedure was designed to arrest. One result was havoc in my right retina -- peripheral vision mightily reduced (I gave my car away) and a buckshot pattern of destruction in the remaining retina, making for blind spots, color near-blindness in that eye, diminished depth-perception, night blindness, sunny day glare-out. So the physical "taster" was affected. But I retain what seems a serviceable memory of many sights from my past. How reliable that memory is is questionable, but my left eye rather corroborates my alleged memory of what my right eye used to see. So, while the world that I used to look at (the analog to the original candy bar) is the same, the physical taster certainly won't be the same, in part because the taster's storing of memories figures to deteriorate with age, and very possibly the "reconstructing" apparatus will change too. With that last phrase I'm thinking of something different from simple recall of stored associated memories. I have a dim intuition that the associating-seeking apparatus may, for example, develop an "appetite" to pull much more from very old associations than from recent ones. Maybe it will retrieve relatively more aural memories than heretofore. And who knows what other changes may come? Consider how drastically different some very old folk seem compared to their younger years.
